Two weeks?

Has it really been that long since the last post here? I'd better contribute before tumble weed hits the front page.

Egoboo 2.8.0 has been released (download + changelog). The Egoboo team stress this is an unstable release, that it hasn't yet seen the kind of testing they would like it to have, but it is "biggest release Egoboo has ever had" so it is good news for the project.

Which got me thinking of the successor to Egoboo, SoulFu. Now, this project has had a rocky history. The author released it as "niceware" (some silly 'you agree to be nice to dogs' license) to prevent forks, but that just meant nobody really got involved. Amazed at the lack of help, along with some criticisms he didn't approve of, he threw his arms up and left the project in a huff.

Some years passed by.

Keen people started to get involved (screenshots!) and it seems it is moving again, albeit hampered by the loss of a domain name and forced to move to a new (crappy free-) forum.

Whether it gets fully rejuvenated and released under a real Free license remains to be seen.

At the end of June, VDrift got a major update. The changes are huge, including a rewritten physics engine that fixes many bugs, improves performance, and vastly improves simulation accuracy, new deferred rendering engine that supports normal maps, true HDR rendering, screen-space ambient occlusion, and soft particles, meshes for brake rotors, better wheel and tire meshes, bugfixes and tweaks to control input management, and new sounds.

Every now and again, somebody comes along and takes a Free game project and does something with it that makes you think "wow" and "that's why Free is cool". That applies to this guy porting VDrift to use OGRE. He wanted a stunt car racer game, he liked VDrift's design and physics but wanted to graphical options presented by OGRE, so he knocked up this rather awesome looking hybrid:

How cool is that? Anyway, find out more at the (surely tentatively named) VDrift-OGRE project.

650 Days Later

No, it's not another diabolical sequel... it's the number of days since the last major Freeciv release until yesterday when Freeciv 2.1 went gold.

People round on Freeciv for being unoriginal, but for me it fixes most of the problems with one of the greatest game franchises ever and is, well, Free Software. So for me Freeciv is everything that's great about Free gaming too! :-)

Hi-res graphics (well, relative to Civ2/Freeciv2.0) and a new SDL interface that got last minute save/load support *cheer*, better AI, and a lot of gameplay balancing - just some of the many features that went into this release. It's been worth waiting for and my brother has promised me a game once we acheive some work milestones! Multiplayer Civ is a lot of fun and very involving (who needs FPS games?) but importantly the Freeciv team place high value on the single player edition so it caters to the casual gamer as well as the intense one.

I came across another open source 3D flight simulator (some one commented on the open source flight combat article) - Palomino is an open-source flight simulator and 3D engine for Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac. No idea if it is new or what not, but the screenshots are intriguing albeit a bit simple.

I had some more stuff to post...

Ah, that's it, preliminary Linux port of Egoboo has been posted and it's got a subversion repository so development should be more organised [read: faster?] from now on. I've enjoyed seeing developer Zefz pushing Egoboo forward despite SoulFu attracting all the attention and Egoboo has seen a lot of new features recently and is subsequently a much richer game than SoulFu yet obviously has the style similarity. I would love to see some of the graphical Panache of SoulFu merged into the more evolved Egoboo world but until the SoulFu license situation is cleaned up I guess that is out of the question!

I should post screenshots for Freeciv 2.1 and Egoboo, but there are none on the websites and the FG hounds are hounding me into a midnight walk. So, er, annoying dogs win vs readership. You guys just don't whine enough!

Game Announcements Now Onine

There is now a Game Announcements section on the forum. Anonymous posting is allowed (but moderated) and any form of FOSS game news is welcome. The idea being is that if you want to publicize a game in any way, post the update there. New versions, new demos, new tournaments, new news, whatever. It is also fully RSSed so, well, if you have a website, include it. Let's get lots of Free Software gaming updates to the world so everybody can know about it.

You may notice a 'Chat' irc link above - #freegamer on irc.freenode.net - another community experiment. IRC has always been a popular medium for collaboration so we'll see if that works for Free Gamer too. ;-)

Good news for *nix users (Linux, BSD etc) who have wanted, but been unable, to play SoulFu - somebody has posted a modified download of SoulFu (~1.5.1) which should compile and run. YMMV. It didn't work for me.

Vega Strike 0.5 finally hits beta. Anybody who has read this blog before should know all about VS and how awesome this version is looking. Love space games? Go help test it.

Qudobup aka Uber-Q has been collecting links of new open source games he has come across in the FG forums. It's in the News Flash bit on Game Announcements (linked above). More tomorrow... hopefully! :-)

Return of the Jedi Gamer

WWWWhaaaat?! 3 days since I last posted? Disgraceful.

Oh well, trying and make this one interesting I guess! ;-)

Blood Frontier

Blood Frontier, a single player FPS using the Sauerbraten engine, has seen it's first alpha release become available for download. As it's a Sauer mod, it works on all major platforms. It aims to provide an atmospheric single player experience with depth, one of the major missing open source genres. The game development will be open source but I don't think there's anything in SVN yet as the main author doesn't know how to use SVN - but that'll change.

I think games will start emerging from the Sauer stables now the engine has matured a bit. There are thousands of game modders out there producing content for free for commercial titles, and I think Sauer could attract a lot of those if the community makes a lot of noise about it. Of course, it's not perfect, but community projects can be improved and cater to the community, so it's a powerful platform for creating Free games.

Vega Wars

Let's start with the first screenshots of Vega Wars - a marriage between Vega Strike and Vega Wars. Whilst these are simply Star Wars models in-game, creating a decent amount of game content is one of the most time consuming aspects of mod-creation (and Vega Wars is a mod) so it's good to see that part being made significantly quicker by gaining access to the vast majority of required models, all of which are of considerable quality in both detail and accuracy.

Speaking of Vega Strike, development is very active at the moment and there's only a few minor things left to do before the next major release. There are still a lot of improvements to be made to the game but the combination of active development and an active community will see to that. Hopefully from no onwards releases will be more frequent and less signficant.

There's another Egoboo Resurrection release. Version 2.4.3 is another impressive update and if it keeps going Egoboo may actually be better than it's predecessor. Saying that, it looks like SoulFu is becoming fully open source with talk of a Sourceforge project appearing in the near future to manage development. Egoboo is still only distributed as source and a Windows binary, but the source version should (I'm told) compile on Linux although a few graphical glitches still remain.

Time to take the two Free Gamer hounds for a walk, lest they start eating my feet in nervous desparation.

SoulFu 1.5 "Niceware"

There's a new release of SoulFu. Whilst the source still comes under a funny license that many would not consider true open source, I believe any restrictions previously placed in the game are now removed. Downloads are up for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

If you like the game concept but feel strongly about the source code license then the main alternative has to be Egoboo Resurrection - ironically also originally developed by Aaron and no surprise given the graphical similarities. [Edit - a better link, thanks Jacky. Also worth noting is that Egoboo Resurrection is currently available only for Windows although it should be compilable for Linux.]

Also the FreeOrion team snuck out another release - 0.3.1-rc6 - a couple of weeks ago. It's an explore, expand, exterminate [is that correct] kind of space strategy game with a very nice user interface and designed for a deep gameplay experience. I don't recall seeing this release announced anywhere. Also, it seems a strangely large update from 0.3.1rc5:

This release has many UI improvements, new art, bug fixes, and various minor and medium-scale backend changes. Notable major changes are the long-awaited OpenAL sound system (removing a non-free dependency) and Python AI scripting that can be modified without needing to rebuild FreeOrion itself.

Meh, who am I to argue but really, that's surely worthy of a 0.3.2 label at least!? Anyway, the game is available as a Windows installer but Linux users must compile from source.

Finally a quick note on the Open Football project. On the wiki is a small update saying that the game should be at a playable demo state before Christmas this year. Great news for a fantastic looking project. :-)

Busy Gamer

PR: Parallel Universe

Too busy to post properly today. :-(

• Ecksdee is not dead (news update)


• Parallel Universe (a mod for Privateer Remake - which itself is a Vega Strike mod) now has a gallery


• Interstate Outlaws is definitely open source (confirmed with the author)


• SoulFu author leaves game to community development but still under dubious license

More information on the latter two tomorrow.

Outlaws on Interstates

A little bit late today, but that's ok because tomorrow is Sunday, a Holy day, a day of rest, so I don't have to post. :-D

Eek, where to start?

Tilt-n-Roll is an innovative open source project that uses the tilting mechanism in modern laptops to recreate the classic wooden labyrinth experience. GPL, runs on Lin, Mac, and Win. What more could you ask for?

Version 1.4 of the semi-open source 3D RPG game SoulFu is available for download from Aaron Bishop's homepage. The page only lists .exe downloads but I'm sure Linux versions will appear in the official forums sooner rather than later.

SoulFu minivid

Soul Fu creator Aaron has responsed to the general querying of his "unique" distribution methods for the game:

I wanted to make a good game, and I do want people to improve it -- I simply don't have the time or desire to do it myself. Getting millions and millions of people to play the game is a goal, but SoulFu is a lot of things... It's a little experiment in creative marketing, an object lesson in morality, a nice résumé, and a tool for would-be game makers. I personally think SoulFu is more fun than most games you'd buy in the store -- they sell the sizzle, not the steak. And it has the potential to be much more, especially if you get a couple of friends together...

The game has a lot of interest and support. If, from the get go, he'd released it as open source, set up merchandising with cafepress and added Google ads to his sites, he'd be making more money than he is now and SoulFu would have many more people contributing to it and helping him market it.

So, yesterday I commented on how similar Automanic and Interstate Outlaws were. The main author of IO dropped me an email:

Just letting you know whats going on with Automanic, as you seem to be hanging out for it. I'm the guy that was working on it, but I've since dropped Automanic, and am now coding Interstate Outlaws. That's probably why they seemed similar to you :) You should try IO, i think it is better than Automanic was, and is probably similar to what Automanic 0.3 or maybe 0.4 would have been.

D'oh.

After posting I did think to myself this could be the case but was busy with other stuff so didn't go back and post a note saying as such. Still, not much to say other than, "Common Sense 1 - 0 Charlie". That and Interstate Outlaws is a way cooler name than Automanic. ;-)

Java Classic RPG project has another snapshot release, showing off day-night cycles and lots of foilage. It's starting to look quite cool although a long way off being an actual game, but every step is a step closer. :-)

Also version 2.2.0 of Bygfoot Football Manager has been released. Not much change from the 2.1.x releases other than stability and translations. I still don't like the UI but haven't had time to work on my own creation yet... *evil grin* soon, my children, soon...

Privateer Parallel Universe

Parallel Universe, a modification of Privateer Remake, has gotten itself a rather smart website and community forums. There's a good bit of work going on over there and the feedback on PU is generally pretty good. Definitely worth a look for space game fans. It is also part of a rather complex development scene based around Privateer & Wing Commander games. I'll get back to that in a bit.

A couple of Ubuntu users have posted their first serious effort at a game, Slingshot. It's a fairly simple 2D affair, take it in turns to shoot at each other, your shots being affected by the gravity pulls of planets.

I've mentioned Egoboo Resurrection a few times - a continuation of the classic game Egoboo. I've not really mentioned that it's only released for Windows despite the original predominantly being a Linux game. It just comes down to a lack of Linux based contributors. However there's another "branch" called Egoboo 2.x which has binaries for Mac OS X and Windows. I'm sure eventually a Linux guy will pop up and help out but until then it seems us Lusers are a bit stuck when it comes to getting an Egoboo fix. I guess there is always SoulFu. Anyway, to encourage contributors one of the Egoboo Resurrection devs posted a development bundle which comes with game editing tools as well as the source.

There's now a Mac OS X binary up for the latest Warzone 2100 release, 2.0.7. Good day for Mac users, eh? :-)

Back to PU and a bit about the scene which PU comes from, and it's all a bit complex, rotating around the Vega Strike engine. Some of the VS devs (herein called the 'devs') made Privateer Remake. This got noticed by the Wing Commander nuts at crius.net (herein called the 'canons') who are dedicated to their cause. Some less fierce but equally obsessed WC fans (herein called the 'non-canons') at the same time started forming Wing Commander Universe, a super-mod that encompassed all things WC, a lot of which started making it's way into PR. Unhappy at the way PR was not completely true to the original Privateer, the canons - with help from the devs - created Privateer Gemini Gold, a fork of PR. The canons publicly denounce WCU. The non-canons decided that not only was the limitations imposed on gameplay in PGG not conducive to a fun game, but they did not go far enough, so created Parallel Universe, something even less true to it's WC heritage that embraces fun over accuracy.

So you now have a triangle of groups - the devs with VS and PR, the canons with PGG who gets help from the devs, the non-canons with WCU and PU who collaborate with the devs on PR. It's quite an interesting thing to follow. It's quite a caustic atmosphere between the canons and the non-canons. At the end of the day, not everybody can always get along, and the canons are abrasive at best, with questionable forum policies and immature moderation the last time I encountered them.

Anyway, my point was that PGG is the most well known of all the projects. However, feedback isn't that great on the latest release 1.02 which new players are finding incredibly hard with a high starting difficulty. The PU team could flank PGG in terms of community by being a more fun game to play so attracting more players and contributors. And there's PR in the middle that will no doubt continue to, well, be in the middle.

I hope I got that all correct. Whilst it was a stormy path to the projects we have today, I think each project serves a niche and they can coexist harmoneously. It may even turn out to be one of those situations where the existance of one is what spurs on the other - Yin and Yang etc. :-)

Scourge and SoulFu

Scourge 0.18 (download) has been released. :-)

If you don't know, Scourge is a 3D RPG game inspired by top-down old school isometric-ish games e.g. Exult. Scourge tries to blend classic gameplay with modern graphics. It has a light hearted plot but is designed to be easily moddable. As the game progresses, in the future I hope to see a few cool mods crop up. I personally really like Scourge because I've watched the development for several years and helped a little here and there.

Scourge 0.18 brings a revamped UI, localization and translations, and a slew of bug fixes. It is starting to shape into a nice game and really the only major task they have to really tackle to make this a very distinctive and brilliant Free game is to sort out some proper character models. The current set are just bits and pieces Gabor Torok (Scourge author) managed to find online.

It's ironic that many projects seem to have either only programmers or only artists, and struggle to find the ideal balance for development. I have contemplated setting up a site where open source games can make calls for help with programming, artwork, or modelling, since at the moment it's just a case of hoping somebody with the right skill and interest eventually finds your game project - there is no centralized resource for organizing open source game development and I think one is increasingly needed as the number of people creating free software games keeps rising.

SoulFu

Aaron Bishop, the original author of Egoboo (see Egoboo Resurrection for current versions) has finally finished his latest game after 4 years of development. SoulFu is currently only available for Windows but he is planning Linux and Mac versions of the game. The game is freeware but maybe after some time he'll open source it like he did with Egoboo.

You can see the graphical similarities between SoulFu and Egoboo, the chunky cutesy character models, but the graphics look a little more refined in SoulFu. It looks fun but my Windows machine is too pap to play it so perhaps a few readers could comment on what the gameplay is like. There are a couple of gameplay videos [1, 2] from earlier on in development just to give an idea of what how SoulFu plays.

Edit - hey, you have to pay money for the full SoulFu experience :-( that really sucks (no mention on the webpage) and I'm frustrated that I mentioned it now!

There's been some interest on the Ubuntu forums about making a Gunbound-like game. For those who don't know, Gunbound (gameplay video) is kinda like Worms only with fancier graphics and weapons. If this project goes ahead, I hope they look at working with the Wormux crew who have an engine capable of 90% of the needs of this project-in-planning.